


The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

by Ignae



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: BAMF Charlie Weasley, Explicit Language, F/M, Hermione Granger is a Good Friend, Hermione Granger-centric, Hurt/Comfort, It won't earn its Explicit rating for a while but we will get there when we get there, M/M, Neuroatypical Hermione, Slow Burn, So incredibly slow burn you might begin to question if there's actually ever going to be any burning, because honestly Hermione has earned it after all this bullshit, but there will be - Freeform, canon-divergence, there will be so much burning
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-15
Updated: 2020-03-13
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:28:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22262605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ignae/pseuds/Ignae
Summary: After the Battle of Hogwarts, Hermione is left traumatized and mission-less for the first time in her life. Unable to much help her Weasley found family or to navigate a broken Wizarding World without her parents or help, she struggles to find a purpose or path forward without a strong guide. She's struggling to find her place, and to make any progress along a path by herself, and her mental health isn't doing much to help.Enter Charlie Weasley, who is trying to hold a family that he mostly avoided together with both hands, who is uniquely suited to understand both Hermione's struggle and to see her as a friend and reliable teammate. Together they can hopefully help mend their mutually semi-estranged family, figure out a place for themselves, and maybe eventually figure out that they could probably do all of this better if they gave in and hooked up.Full of hurt, full of healing, and eventually likely to be full of porn, don't read if you think Molly or Ron are saints or that Ron belongs with Hermione.Shout out to @MistandMagic for Beta'ing for me, and apologies for dumping hurtfic on you with limited warning.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger/Charlie Weasley
Comments: 8
Kudos: 58





	1. Introduction

He calls her his Dragon Girl, when she bites him as she comes.

—ooo—ooo—ooo—

Earlier on, at the start, she had flushed hot with embarrassment, or turned away, or been tempted to shout at him, but he wasn’t Ron, he wasn’t saying it to pick a fight, he wasn’t driving the knife in a little deeper about how she wasn’t quite /normal/ and couldn’t be quite /right/, that she wasn’t Lavender, that she was a girl but somehow she wasn’t the right kind of girl, the right kind of girlfriend- All the things that pet names had secretly meant, that she didn’t realize. He was looking at her-actually seeing her- with such staggeringly honest awe that it made her want to shrivel up and die in a new, novel, and not completely appreciated way. She didn’t know how to cope, that was the thing. Hermione had always thought that, with as many coping mechanisms that she had built up to deal- an entire life built around just _dealing,_ always researching and imitating and trying to be Better, but without a moment of relief before the next wave of socialization and stimulation and struggle crashed down and left her abandoned, without a compass, but determined to Do Right, as she- that she was just… That she would always be a little bit dirty, a little bit scarred, and more than a little bit scared.

Earlier on, when this hadn’t meant anything to anyone, when it had been her, alone in the darkness, after the screaming and the spell-fire had faded and the weeping had run her raw, when she was hiding in a classroom far away from the wailing where she could sit in silence and try to process what to do, because even now, as she felt like her chest was going to rip in half, she was trying to Do The Right Thing- Because she loved them all, and because she loved them she was trying, carefully, to pour her emotions _outward_ instead of _inward_ (she had read once about the rings of grief, read once about how to Be Supportive through grief, how you couldn’t pour your grief inwards towards the people who had been more deeply affected than you, you had to let them pour their grief out towards you, and you could only pour out, away from the wound, like a scarlet bullseye of bleeding grief-

But she couldn’t, because [Fred, and his wild joy that made the room light up, literally, surrounded by his brothers and mother and father and sister and absolutely choking on their sorrow, Filled Up and Pouring, Harry standing with them, a Weasley as well, and as stricken as they because there lay Lupin too, the last of his father’s Family, the last member of his and Sirius’ family, Tonks too, all one family, all one breath, Luna gone to find her father, Neville to find his grandmother-

Her parents, blithe and blind to what she was suffering, completely unaware now, the way that they had only _seemed_ to be for most of her life] she had nowhere to pour her grief to.

She had been slumped against the wall in the dark, trying to Remember, trying to be Helpful, be Good, to be anything other than as useless as she couldn’t help but feel- and she was holding them at arm’s length she knew, which wasn’t the Right Choice. If she was Better she would know what the right thing to do and she knew she was fucking up now by not being there was but she didn’t know how to be better and no one had told her, and all she felt was useless-

When He had slammed the door open, the doorknob bouncing off the wall with a crack so loud that it fired off her battle-reflexes, (they had kept her alive, the PTSD wasn’t Post yet, wasn’t a Disorder, was just traumatic stress that she was barely surviving through, that had been ramping up since childhood and all through the Chamber of Secrets and Pettigrew and Cedric, oh Cedric, and Sirius and running and hiding and all the time, barely Coping ahead of the rising tide and most of the time just behind it, mouth full of seawater that was rich with blood) startling her up so fast that she nearly went out the window. Panting, face shadowed against the weak sunlight cast inwards from behind her, a matted-haired mess with no identity but wand out and level, shield spell already glittering, humming, wordlessly blue around her body and-

face to face with another face that she could actually _read_ , because it felt just as full of grief and rage and uselessness as she did, with nowhere to pour it to-

He had reached for her automatically, not meaning anything more by it, just to catch her before she fell and she had flinched- because flinching was what had kept her safe through her childhood as a muggle who was Different, long before magic, back when she was bullied for info-dumping and reading under her desk and forced to make friends who were not friends, just barely tolerated her, at the recommendation of her Mum’s Friend From Med School- and had barely kept her safe as a Mudblood in a world that she didn’t have enough status to be considered Eccentric in, rather than Weird.

He froze, in a pose that she later learned that was just as much an instinct for him as flinching was for her; after years of soothing magically-inclined siblings with no control and explosive tempers, followed by as many years soothing magically-infused monsters with less than no control over being literally explosive. Hands up, palms open, no wand, no threat, not coming close to even be within lunging range, legs balanced and wide so that he was braced enough that he could deal with a sudden onrush of sparks or flame or anything else that might be coming his way-

But almost not enough, as it turned out, to deal with a traumatized 17 year old flinging herself at him and hugging him awkwardly but roughly with enough force to slam him into the doorframe.

It was all she could think of doing, because she had been able to hide from the Family downstairs but if one of its’ members was going to present itself inescapably in front of her, she would try to redeem herself through Showing Care, and hugs were Care- only to realize, belatedly, that she had never hugged Him before, never in all the years she had stayed over at the Burrow or at Grimauld Place or at the weddi- [she redacted her brain, she wouldn’t go there, was a mistake], that she might be asking for Care instead of Caring, that this might be Pouring Inwards instead of Out-

But then he was stroking her hair and saying words about it being alright and shhh and let it out and she felt the cold lance of fear go through her ribs, pooling nauseatingly through her guts to ricochet back up her esophagus- and she was jumping away again, horrified at taking from him, at Pouring In-

Only to recognize the look on his face again, even more strangely, mirroring the same emotion that she felt- of being so lost to grief that all she could do was try to Help, and that she was somehow still fucking that up.

—ooo—ooo—ooo—

The silence was tense for some reason that Hermione, as weary as she was, couldn’t begin to summon the mental bandwidth to try to unpack. Instead she stayed put, between Him and the desk she had stumbled back against, panting as her heart rate slowly began to subside.

Charlie Weasley stood in the doorframe, dust turning his normally vividly orange ponytail grey, less like a banked fire than one reduced almost completely to ash. Burned through. Which could also describe the rest of him- drained, half dead, swaying on his feet. Hermione was shocked that she hadn’t knocked him over in her, in retrospect, obviously Stupid hug (what good was Care from her), but-

“I’m sorry.”

The words hung in the air like lead shouldn’t be able to, but still were that heavy.

Hermione stared, mouth hanging open, internal monologue frozen around the leaden words like a spray of icy mist; half formed, weightless, impossible to see or to think through-

Because they hadn’t been her words.

Charlie was still talking, elaborating, as she desperately tried to kick her brain back into gear, to process what was happening because nothing even remotely like it had ever happened before, ever, and she didn’t have the habits, didn’t have the pattern coded, so she couldn’t figure out what the aim was-

“-dispel errant magical residue so no early patronuses got through, and then I had to get outside the range of the anti-Portus charms and then I had to go back to get my broomstick and once I got back it was almost over and you lot were all here, you were doing your best, you did your best, if i had been here i could have helped, i could have helped, but i wasn’t there for Sirius and I wasn’t there for Lupin and I wasn’t there for- I wasn’t there for— for—“

He was out of breath and panting, staring at her, tears rolling down his face.

“Merlin, Hermione, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be dumping this on you, you’ve handled enough shite-.”

When this hadn’t meant anything to anyone, but the shock of being looked at, and seen, and **known** , had meant that it couldn’t mean nothing.

—ooo—ooo—ooo—

Every time, with him, felt like burning. Sometimes it was a low, slow, banked fire that you warmed your hands at all night, sharing company with a friend. Sometimes it was a grassfire, racing through her as she danced in the heart of it, because despite the terror and the risk as long as the hare kept racing she would never burn [GNU Terry Pratchett]. Sometimes it was a torch in the cave-darkness, never having seen sun, the only point of light that kept reminding her of where she was, where she stood.

But it started as a wildfire- not from an escaping spark from the burning-but-contained wreckage that Hermione had been holding onto with both hands, after That Sadistic Arsehole (which is how she privately thought of Voldemort, as she didn’t want to call him by his name or any of his creepier nicknames) had gone running through so many lives with a flamethrower. She was successfully keeping it from spreading into an emotional underbrush that had gone uncleared for seventeen years, allowed to build up trauma and grief and loneliness and abandonment and isolation. She knew instinctively that that forest- guarded, secret, defended- couldn’t help but burn, once touched. So she dealt with that blaze, all the time ignoring the storm coming towards her, the lightning sizzling in its heart, other than as a vague hope for rain.

It started with owls.

Ron, hollow eyed and ashen, yet still screaming at her for not having the right words, for not knowing the right way to soothe, [for not being Lavender, and because no-one ever would be again, because she was in a small plot in her family’s graveyard, and she hadn’t gone to the funeral because of the rage in Ron’s eyes] in the kitchen of the Burrow, the only home that she thought that she had, [she hadn’t Fixed her parents yet, wasn’t sure that she could, wasn’t sure that she could put their memories back together the way her parents had felt them because her versions were never Fixed, never Okay too heavy with confusion and frustration and pain] burnt scrambled eggs in the pan in her trembling both with the weight of the cast iron [her parents used nonstick aluminum] and with exhaustion [it had only been 3 weeks, this was Pouring Out, Mrs. Weasley deserved a rest but Hermione had never cooked for 12 before, never this many meals or dishes, only the food on the run that she had only belatedly remembered that Ron hated as well].

Standing in the silence of Grimauld Place, not really a home either but Harry had stayed with his Family, with Ginny, and hadn’t made eye contact with her during the screaming, but had pressed the front door key into her hand, giving her a way out, but not ashamed of not being able to handle the pressure of standing up for her. Had stayed behind because Ginny didn’t even resemble ash anymore, wasn’t even smoke, was so pale that she might as well have become a ghost- but being a Brother. Her adoptive brother, still loving unconditionally, but still flawed.

So she had started crying again, this time huddled in what had been Tonks’ and Lupins’ room, because it was the room that felt the most lived in, the most loved- with the only photos of Teddy still with his parents that she’d ever seen on the nightstand and Hermione made a mental note to send them on to Harry when she awoke in the morning, for the memorial, but now she was too tired and too drained and all she could do was huddle up on their bed, hollow-eyed, and let the numbness overtake her, swallowing her down into the rough nothingness of sleep-

And there was a tapping at the window.

She awoke in the grey quiet of the dead house, mummified in blankets she had felt too Ashamed to crawl under properly. Unsure of how much time had passed, only that she was Ashamed for having taken even the edge off her grief in sleep when so few others could [everyone grieves in different ways but that doesn’t stop you feeling like your way is somehow the weakest], she went to the window to find a bedraggled, scorch-charred screech owl who looks as soul-weary as she feels. He hops onto the ledge, extends his leg, and then huddles, head under wing, to sleep. He doesn’t move when she closes the window behind him, too weary to hop. She has to carefully maneuver his tail feathers away from the lip as she lowers the window quietly, trying not to wake him.

Putting aside the question of how an owl could be authorized under the Fidelius charm to ponder for another time [Does the sender have to be authorized? Or just the receiver? Or both? She’d love to experiment but she doubts anyone would be willing to participate in them with her], she unrolls the parchment, a scrap really, to find the ragged missive, clearly dashed off so quickly that the shaking is undisguised, in handwriting she’s never seen before but she knows on sight (the scorch marked bird really did help)

“Sorry for “saying sorry for shite I didn’t do”, again, but he really is being a complete prat and while you must be the foremost expert, this is fucking absurd”.

Hermione stares at the scrap, baffled for a moment- for the bird to have gotten here this fast, Charlie must have overheard Ron yelling, and gone straight to the roost where all the family birds now slept [Hermes, Pig, -not Hedwig, with a pang-, Errol, Fleur’s silvery Argent, Bill’s lean, golden Aten] and scrawled this on the first scrap of paper he could find, knowing both that she wouldn’t be in the room anymore by the time he tried to interfere, and that she wouldn’t have wanted anyone to.

And they hadn’t spoken, really, since the not-so-useless hugging, because she hadn’t known what to say to his apologies because he didn’t need to make them, because he and she both needed a purpose and something to protect and, much to her confusion, he wasn’t trying to protect her. So they had sat silently in the room, Hermione crying silently, and Charlie with his head in his hands, sharing the quiet. Which had fed into a whole lot of sitting and sharing the quiet, because she didn’t know what to say, and neither, apparently, did Charlie.

A feeling she can’t identify pops in her chest, somewhere between gratitude, relief, and misery; she knows from habit that this is probably pity, that this is someone trying to ease the tension and return everything to the way that it was before she was hurt, but… She very rarely is apologized to, in the process; Ron and Harry and Ginny and Lavender and Mrs. Weasley and her Mum and everyone always assume that a few kind words and a whole lot of denial make everything right- and it usually does, Hermione’s just grateful that she hasn’t been kicked out of the group yet, like she has so many times before [and her heart seizes, is that what happened? is this the only apology she sometimes gets? when she’s no longer welcome back and they’re making the polite noises that mean that she can never go home, and she wonders if it would be that bad, if she hadn’t been expecting this the whole time]

And then she turns it over;

“Do you want to talk?.”

And she stares, because neither Ron nor Harry nor Ginny nor Luna nor Neville (her only real friends, and maybe she’s not being fair enough to Luna, she’s always been empathetic, but she prefers to draw things out gently and slowly like dilution and this is lancing a wound, this is stabbing at the heart to let it drain and people always get mad when she does that so it’s alien to have it done to you, and she knows why Neville would rather avoid, and maybe even Harry to an extent, because who wants to think about his family with a family like that ) ever ask that, and it’s not like she and Charlie did much talking either-

She’s still standing there when Errol arrives, clearly having lagged behind more from the age of the bird than from the distance between writing the messages.

“Or I could stuff him in Norberta’s feedbin, if that’s better”

And standing there, smiling for the first time in what feels like years, until a second before alone in the grey, there’s a wind rising through the trees, and some embers start to roll.


	2. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Apologies to those of you who want smut immediately, when I say slow burn, oh boy do I fucking mean slow burn

She was so damn tired.

Before, during school, she had always worked herself to the bone during the academic year; emotionally and physically, trying to be Helpful as well as a Good student, but also because she loved to learn. Which, to be fair, didn’t always make things easier; loving to learn wasn’t the same thing as Learning for some reason, so when the teacher gave them a six page handout from a book and covered what it was as a referenceinstead of actually exploring what the text meant, Hermione struggled. She would be distracted, want to go read the book in its entirety, over and over, dive into it, grasp the nuance, the flavor, the counterarguments. She was everything except reductive. Which, of course, drove her teachers insane [this was a group of eight year olds, they didn’t need to know about Emily Dickenson other than that she was a poet, maybe that she was reclusive, but that she was Important and they’d learn about her when she was older- not that she was probably a lesbian, that her father shut her away in shame, that Emily understood Not Living In Vain better than anyone Hermione had ever read before],her classmates to resentment [why the hell would they want to read poetry, sport was next], and her parents to frustration [Hermione had been reading under the desks, again].

But for all her parents frustration, she had Holidays; over the summers they went to France, or to the Highlands, or just to visit her aunt in Bath; she had all the books she could want and none of the grading, none of the siblings or the peers to help and she was a Child so as long as she kept her room tidy and cleared away her place after dinner she was Good. She rested, and looked forward to the luxury of it; sometimes her parents missed the mark, of course, not understanding why the cold and the somehow simultaneously dry-wet and limited mobility of skiing was unpalatable and stressful [all the worst parts of Broomstick riding, and none of the ability to dodge trees], but she could Rest.

Hermione had never realized how much having this inherent system of “Trying” versus “Existing” had defined her; having to be social-and-culture facing instead of Being Herself [even if she was Ashamed, much of the time, about what her actual preferences were] was the reason that she could keep Trying. She knew when her break was going to be, knew that once she was on the train back home (without Ron and Harry, with Luna and Neville and Ginny quietly reading or chatting) she could curl up like a cat and just read whatever she pleased, or sleep, or knit, or just exist- without having to justify doing so. The race would, of course, resume, but now was the time for rest.

Last summer, there hadn’t been much of one.

After Dumbledore’s death, the whole banging crescendo of Harry being handed the Horcrux quest, of the Wedding [though her stomach turned in knots just thinking of it], they had just… started running. Days of no distinct mission, no criteria for completion or failure; only the binary of “not yet”. “Still alive”. And somehow, it had fallen to her, the one who cared the most about criteria, not about pass-or-fail but degrees of success, to keep everyone’s spirits up, to remind them that things were still okay (though okay had never been Good Enough for her either), but Ron seemed to lack the ability to emotionally regulate through this [she only realized belatedly, that the pressure of constantly recalibrating herself to her culture probably was why she had control over this, Ron never had, Ron had always known what success and failure were and was comfortable floating just below success, so used to never reaching it].

She was the one who got groceries, who did supplementary reading, who researched what the next books should be, who kept the house habitable and survivable, and the only ray of light in it was Dumbledore, that he had known who she was- like Ariana, he had told her once, quietly, in their only private conversation, brilliant Ariana who loved reading and research and had hated the texture of the grass but loved her mother so went for walks on it daily to Try. Who info-dumped to her muggle friends who thought it was a lovely, silly game, whose older siblings attacked her for being a freak, whose underage magic lashed out and hurt them far, far worse than an eight year old should have been able to because of the control and shaping exercises in books she had read long, long ago, and her father’s wand, which she had been practicing with. Ariana, who wasn’t permitted a wand after that, Ariana who had never come to Hogwarts, Ariana who had been a warning and a horror kept hidden in the house, magically sedated [their mother worried that she would become a powerful dark Sorceress, not believing Albus or Aberforth when they said that all she wanted to do was Learn and Be Safe, that kind of magic was an Omen, and oh, the sick irony of her dying to protect Aberforth from Grindlewald-], but Ariana had been raised in a different age, had parents who pretended she was Normal instead of resenting that she wasn’t, hadn’t been loved, had been feared, and Dumbledore, with a tear running down his crooked nose [who Hermione had hugged, knowing that it wasn’t Appropriate for a student to hug a teacher, but knowing that he likely needed one] had said that seeing Witch that Hermione had grown into, he had hope for the tragedy of his sister never repeating, that he was proud to call Hermione the Brightest Witch of her Generation with no caveats [no notes in her report card that she didn’t socialize well enough, that she was precocious ], would have been proud to call her a sister-

Dumbledore understood that she would read and reread, over and over again, and held and would hold them together. Just like he understood that Harry would Sacrifice, and that Ron would Leave [and come back, Harry always reminded her, but that hadn’t mattered much at the time, she was still the spine and the mind and and Harry the hands and the heart and Ron? Ron was the feet that bloody RAN AWAY (and in the privacy of her own mind, also the Prick that couldn’t help cocking everything up)].

So they ran and they fought and they hid and they kept running, and Ron got to go home to his family and rest and Hermione poured herself into keeping everything Fine, hoping that at the end of it that it would be Fine again, even though she privately suspected that nothing would ever be fine again. And then the Battle happened, and-

So she stayed, curled, on Lupin and Tonks’ bed, sure that it wasn’t Time to Rest, but also that there was no-one to ask; that she Should be helping at the Burrow but that Ron didn’t want her there so Mrs. Weasley wouldn’t, either that her parents couldn’t be asked, might never be able to be asked, and Dumbledore was dead, the Ministry in shambles, even Lupin and Tonks gone, so.

She sat, quietly, using her incredibly powerful magic and deep knowledge to… make herself a cup of tea without having to go down to the kitchen [she had quietly repacked her Undetectable Extension once having access to the Hogwarts kitchen before the battle, uncertain if the war would end or if they would be on the run again. Boxes of teabags, dozens of pounds of rice and barley, sugar, other baking basics, so many spices that she could have killed for, last year. And her crowning achievement, a cold box that ran on Frigidairo and only needed to be refreshed once a week, filled with eggs and meat and cheese and heavy cream in an additional stasis that kept the bacteria from growing at all. She wasn’t going to be trapped on the run again with no preparation, she was ready for war, even though she couldn’t get canned goods without going by some muggle shops-]. Aguamenti, Hot-Air Spell on a Leviosa’d mug, steep, cream, sugar, Evanesco the teabag. It was good practice, she reminded herself, justifying the fact that she didn’t want to go down to the kitchen, didn’t want to leave this quiet place of Remembering but also of love.

Then she showered. And changed clothes. And reorganized the bag, so that she had access to everything she’d need to camp here, unwilling to leave the quiet little nest of safety that she was building around her, knowing that no-one would come looking for her here. And, in a quiet, small part of her, she felt like her assessment was justified; she knew Lupin and Tonks loved her, even understood parts of her, the bookishness and the desperation to belong, and knew they wouldn’t have minded, had they known.

Which is why it was all the more confusing when the downstairs door creaked open, and she heard footsteps. Heavy footsteps.

—ooo—ooo—ooo—ooo—

She had gotten herself into a nice little routine; waking sometime mid morning, showering, and laying curled, staring at the wall, wrapped in blankets. She showered only because it was one of her habits; after so long with only icy water on the run, she would never again take for granted knowing when her last hot shower was. She’d eaten apples and cheese and out of the jar of peanut butter that she had in the Undetectable, but not much else. She didn’t have much of an appetite.

She didn’t know what came next; she hadn’t taken her NEWTS, was past the age when she should have, had missed a whole year of school and of learning when they went looking for the Horcruxes, and hadn’t officially graduated from school, either. What she _could_ do was confusing as well, not sure if she even qualified for a position as a shop-keeper’s assistant. Normally she would ask Mrs. Weasley, but… she needed to deal with more important things right now. Which didn’t help her; didn’t help the gnawing anxiety of not knowing what the next thing to do was, what the next step was, when a little over a year ago she had everything planned; she was going to graduate with full NEWTs and take the Healer training program before becoming an Auror, to be better ready to fight Voldemort, to be able to keep her friends alive and safe- And now she felt like flotsam on a tide that had no intention of depositing her on a beach any time soon.

Crookshanks came in and out of the window to hunt, and to eat from the bowls that she left under it, and to curl up on her lap and look at her with worry; some days he brought her books, or yarn, or just curled up on her lap purring up a storm, but he was gone today, and he had been yesterday, which had begun to worry her-

The stairs creaking, before all of this had happened, would have made check who had come; no one had come to Number 13 since she had arrived a little over a week ago, but between the confidence that absolutely no one would come looking for her, and that anyone who came wouldn’t go into this room, and the sheer weight of her emotional exhaustion, she didn’t move. The tears that had been building on her cheeks didn’t help, either.

“Granger?”

She held her breath, not wanting it to be Ron, not wanting to have to deal with him apologizing _at_ her instead of apologizing _to_ her, just wanting to be left alone in the quiet to try to figure out what she was supposed to be doing-

“Granger, I need a favor-“

Before she realized it, she was on her feet, slippers on, and opening the door, because it definitely wasn’t Ron, but was familiar-

There was Charlie, standing on the landing, looking up like he expected her to be coming down from a higher floor, not aware that she was less than ten feet from him. But at the sound of the door opening made him start, and showed that George was with him, standing shadow-like behind him.

“Hey”

Her voice cracked from disuse, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“Can we talk? Downstairs?”

She nodded, grabbing a shawl to drape around her shoulders from inside the room. Following, she almost didn’t notice George slip inside of the room that the twins had occupied, and close the door softly behind him, but she did notice the frown of concern that deepened the lines on Charlie’s face.

She followed him down the stairs and into the kitchen, where he stopped, looking around critically. The room had no signs of life in it; no evidence of cooking, recent or not, the cupboards were bare and there was a thin layer of dust on the table.

“Merlin, Granger, haven’t you been eating?” The look he shot her wasn’t of worry, it was of confusion; his eyes travelled down her body, seeming to check for lost weight, before lingering on her face, which, while still gaunt, looked not much gaunter than the last time she’d seen him.

“Not here.”

He looked at her with heightened confusion, and what looked like a deepening of the lines around one side of his mouth [smile? not a smile, couldn’t be a frown, but she couldn’t imagine him smiling and it wasn’t an overt expression, not one of the ones she knew how to read].

“I was gonna make a cuppa and ask you a few things, but this doesn’t look like-“

She cut him off quickly, not wanting him to think that she was helpless, or hadn’t been taking care of herself. “Come upstairs”

He followed her through the door awkwardly, seeming to know whose room this was before she entered it. He stood like he didn’t know where to put himself, and Hermione felt a stab of sympathy. She cleared her clothes from where they’d been piling up off the chair at the bottom of the bed, by the window, before curling up in her blanket-nest at the head of the bed. He sat uncomfortably, hands not seeming to know where to put themselves, but startled when she pulled out her wand and started the dance of objects and spells that she used to make a cup of tea, finishing with a filled cup floating down to him and depositing itself in his hands.

He looked down at it, with that weird crinkle in the corners of his mouth again [both corners this time?] before seeming to take in the whole picture of her, the pile of blankets, the small stash of personal possessions which didn’t take up much space at all, and took a sip of the tea to gauge how hot it was. Hermione waited, curious despite the dull humming in her eyes and brain. Whatever she expected him to say, it was not-

“Interesting nest you’ve got going here. Very cosy. Well provisioned.”

She continued to stare, hands around her own teacup, not sure if she had heard him correctly, before the hurt and resentment the joke had caused bloomed on her features.

“All you need is a couple-a horns, maybe some smoke coming out your nose- though you seem to have that managed-“

“What do you want, Charlie?”

Her voice made his mouth do that thing again, and her temper eased, reminding herself that it was a joke, that Charlie was likely trying to lighten the mood, that this wasn’t her normal behavior in front of her friends, that he was hurting too-

“I need to ask you a favor. I was concerned, when I saw the kitchen, that you wouldn’t be up for it, but its clear that you’re still taking care of yourself, despite everything.” She nodded, taking a sip of tea, watching him closely.

“Mum’s on the warpath.” He rubbed the base of his neck, heel of his palm brushing his earlobe, from where hung a small, golden ring. “She woke up a couple of days ago and started cleaning the entire house top to bottom, yelling at people to clean and organize with her, saying that the house hadn’t been seen to since before the War started and it was high time, now, to set it to rights.”

Hermione nodded; this sounded like a classic coping mechanism, possibly healthier than her current ones. Charlie took another sip of tea before continuing, seeming to feel bad about what he was going to say next.

“I mean, I get it, that’s Mum for you. But…” He rubbed his neck again, seeming to have a hard time meeting her eyes; he kept glancing around the room.

“Charlie?”

He looked back at her, and his mouth did the thing again, before he looked down at his teacup. “She’s called him Fred at least half a dozen times in the last few days, and instead of being embarrassed, she just brushes over it, like she’s trying to pretend that everything’s normal, and George…”

Hermione’s heart twisted in horror, at the idea of what George must be feeling. She couldn’t even articulate most of it. Her brain slammed on the breaks before letting her empathy reach that point. Charlie continued.

“He hasn’t been eating much, sleeps all the time, and when she tried to go into their room to get him to clean it was the first time we’ve heard him talk in over a month, because he told her to get out of their room. And mum…” Charlie’s eyes looked exhausted, and Hermione automatically started the wand routine again, to get another cup of tea started- “Mum said, I don’t think she was thinking, I think she was trying to keep a brave face on- she said ‘your room, you mean’-“

Hermione gasped, Charlie looked like he was in pain, and put the cup down a little too hard on the windowsill. She… she wanted to hug him, could see how badly he needed one- she had begun to pick up on that cue when she was still at the Burrow, when she realized that Arthur had Molly and Bill had Fleur and Percy was too ashamed to come home and Ron had Harry when Ginny didn’t and was too filled with rage most of the time anyway and George avoided everyone, but- Charlie stood, almost as much of an outsider as she, as filled with as much grief and guilt as she, but still trying to keep everyone together as best as he could.

His face, however, changed to a look of surprise as she uncurled from the bed and went to him, half rising from his chair, and didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands when she grabbed him and held on in such an awkward position, knowing by now that he wouldn’t ask for help, but that she could insist on offering and he would receive it. He sat again, while she still held on, and for a moment she fell, into his lap, and he gave her a rough squeeze before pushing her up to standing again. The lines around his mouth flashed again, and his upper lip looked like it was stiffened.

“Thanks.” She nodded to him in response, as she folded herself back into the blankets, and missed the flashed look of intensity he shot her as she rearranged the blankets and summoned down a fresh cup of tea for him and for herself. She didn’t notice, either, that he had thanked her before she gave him the cup.

“George can’t stay there anymore.” She nodded, watching Charlie drink his tea. Helping him gave her a sense of ease, like she was doing the Right Thing, and on top of that, he was exceptionally easy to help- he was clear about what he needed or wanted, didn’t ever demand anything but let you know what he was doing as he was doing it and let you choose if you wanted to join in, or assist. She wished more people could be like that. He was sensible, too- she had been wondering if Fred wanted to stay even before she left, in a house full of people who flinched when they saw him, in a house where he was both seen as and felt like a ghost.

“I need him to stay with someone, otherwise he won’t eat, but Bill and Fleur took Teddy and he’s more than a handful, and Kingsley’s still trying to get the Ministry up and running again, and McGonagall has to do the same at Hogwarts, so…” He steadied himself, and he actually smiled a little this time, looking at her. “Could he stay here? I was worried, when I saw the kitchen, but you’re doing fine, clearly. He doesn’t need a baby sitter, just to be safe somewhere that I can count on him eating at least twice a day, and that he doesn’t feel pressured to act like everything’s okay.”

Hermione sipped her tea, thinking. George had always been a good friend, always been low-pressure, never asked her to be anyone other than she was- to the point where she knew that though they didn’t always agree on things, he didn’t resent her being different. Frankly, she got the sense that he appreciated her giving him some push-back on rule breaking, as it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun if no one was yelling at him. She didn’t think she was being asked to Care for him, not really, not in the way where she has to put on a brave face and repress what she’s feeling, just to include him in the delicate little soap bubble of barely-keeping-my-shite-together she’s living in now.

“I’ll probably need some more supplies. And to know what he likes to eat; I doubt living off of tea, apples, and cheese is going to do him much good.”

Charlie sagged with relief in the chair, putting his second drained cup to the side and tilting his head back to lean against the wall. Pressing his palms to his eyes and rubbing, his shirt rose up slightly, exposing a shockingly red trail of hair and Hermione consciously jerked her eyes up from noticing; that’s not the sort of thing you’re Supposed to Pay Attention To. The added facts of being Ron’s brother, despite the fact that they had barely ever been together and she doubted they would ever reunite [the implications of the kiss during the Battle had been blisteringly shattered in its aftermath-Ron could barely even look at her unless he was shouting], the fact that he was nearly seven years older than her and this was about the worst possible time to notice anything about anyone in any way, barring literally being in battle against them, meant that this was an ultimate Bad Thought.

Which is why the nervousness of having such a thought tripped her up a little.

So when Charlie took his hands away from his face and flashed her a real, genuine smile, the first she had seen on his face since before the Second War had started,the fact that it felt like a bubble of carbonation bursting in her upper stomach was something that she attributed to nausea at her own bad behavior.

“Now that, is something I can handle,” and from out of his pocket Charlie pulled a second Undetectable Extension’d bag and handed it to her. She peered down inside, seeing a second cold box as well as some boxes of books, extra blankets, a couple of board games and a pair of broomsticks. She looked up at Charlie, unable to help grinning back at the fact that he had already known she would agree, had known that he could count on her.

“The cold box has some of mom’s cooking in it, and I’ll come by every couple of days to bring a hot meal and more supplies if you don’t mind. There are some books for you, if you feel like reading them, as well as some of George’s favorites, and stuff so that if he does seem like he’s ready to do anything social you’re not going to get caught off guard.”

Hermione sighed with relief; Charlie seemed to, in the limited time that she had begun to get to know him, overplan as much as she did. This bag took all the worry out of taking care of George; it was thoughtful, and considerate, and meant there were no hidden clauses that would backfire on her in agreeing to this.

“Well you certainly seem to have thought of everything,” Charlie jumped up suddenly, and started rummaging around in his coat pockets. “Well now that you mention it-“ he made a wincing noise as he stuck his hand into his inner breast pocket, and a hissing sound emanated, “I seem to have forgotten-“, and from it he drew

“Crookshanks!!!” Hermione leapt to her feet, nearly bouncing over to Charlie to take a very irritated looking Crookshanks out of his arms. She held the cat, burying her face in his fur, and taking a deep breath. He smelled like the outside world, wet and grey and green, as well as slightly musky and faintly of charcoal from Charlie's jacket. 

“How on earth did you find him?” Charlie laughed, rubbing the back of his neck again as he looked down at her; the nearly a foot height distance between them did make talking at close range a bit awkward.

“He turned up on my window ledge a few hours ago, before the shouting. Wouldn’t stop following me around yowling at me, and when I told George that I was going to bring him here, he jumped up on my shoulder and wouldn’t leave until I shoved him into the pocket to make Apparating easier.”

Hermione laughed at her cat, who looked up at her with a fairly blank expression, even for a cat. Charlie’s lips made that tight expression again, and his upper lip seemed to stiffen again.

“Well, we do think he’s part Kneazle; they’re problem solvers, so if he missed you, maybe he came by to check up on all of you. He does like you, after all, Merlin knows why.”

Charlie laughed, stroking the cat’s head. He closed his eyes as he purred, rubbing his ears between Charlie’s fingers. Hermione felt the rumble all the way down her torso.

“I was wondering, he is rather large and smart for being just an ordinary cat. He always reminds me a bit of a baby dragon; territorial, a bit too clever for his own good-“ Crookshanks half cracked an eye at this “See, definitely too clever by a half”.

Crookshanks turned in her arms, signaling that he’d prefer to be let down around now, and Hermione let him leap onto the bed, and then slink out the door, pulling it somewhat shut behind him with his tail. Hermione giggled softly, watching him go. “I guess he’s had enough Charlie time for now, then. I’m still surprised that he took to you at all, he barely likes anyone.”

She looked up at Charlie, who was watching her instead of Crookshanks, and who had a small smile playing around his lips. She smiled back, enjoying the moment of brightness, and felt it fade as the smile dropped, and his more serious expression returned.

“It’s good to hear you laugh. I was beginning to get worried that your face was going to be stuck like that forever.” He brushed an errant curl, one that had snuck out of her sloppy ponytail, away from her face. She felt another surge of lightness, laced with the desire to make him laugh again.

“At least I’d still be cute. You need to stop looking so serious; you need all the help you can get, Weasley.” He startled at that, and she got her wish, as chuckle escaped in his startlement.

“Alright, fair shot Grainger.” He looked down at her for a moment, with that same tight expression returning to his lips.

“You know it’s going to be like this for a while, right?” She shook her head, the giddy feeling winking out in an instant. “Grief takes a long time. You shouldn’t be ashamed.”

“Neither should you.” His eyes darkened, and she knows that no matter what she says, she’s not going to be able to convince him of that, just like she hadn’t been able to convince him of his innocence in the result of the Battle. He’s just as likely to carry the guilt with him as she is.

Charlie sighed, and straightened his jacket. Pulling out his wand, he headed to the door of the room. “Merlin, Hermione, how have you gotten so far without just burying emotions you don’t like? It’s clearly a nuclear waste problem, you just bury things, cover them with a ton of dirt, hide the entrance and you never. have. to think. about it. again. But, seriously, thank you. For everything.“

Hermione couldn’t help but grin wryly, as he pulled open the door. “Let me know if you need any help putting up warning markers, I read this interesting article about how to keep future humans from accidentally excavating nuclear material.” Charlie huffed in laughter, already intent on heading out of the building.

If she hadn’t been listening closely to the door as it closed behind him, she wouldn’t have heard him whisper “of _course_ you have”.


	3. Chapter 3

The bar was soft, creamy, almost warm to touch, in the way that all old, well-worn and well-polished pieces of wood felt, over time. It caught the dim gold light of the room and held it, slowly absorbing its warmth and color until it seemed to give off a duller version of that same light, instead of merely reflecting it. The metallic sheen of the reflection shimmered and twisted down the length of the surface until ran against the dark wooden wall of the room where it splintered, fractured, and was absorbed. The bar was the solid centerpiece of the entire room, the thing that the entire establishment and its patrons could dependably brace themselves against.

It felt nice against Ron’s face.

Ron Weasley was not having a nice week.

Blearily, he rubbed a finger through the ring of condensation that a pint glass had left on the friendly wood. The water beaded up nicely, the surface tension making a pleasant doughnut shape. He was trying to think of when he had last had a nice week- no, scratch that, had a not, not-nice week. Probably the week before the last Triwizard task, now that he thought of it- right up until the moment that Harry had appeared in front of the whole school, clutching the vacant-eyed and limp body of Cedric Diggory.

Since then, every single week had been gradually flooding with the slowly mounting sense of being behind-the-curve, somehow. Though it had been a familiar feeling, one carried- to a lesser extent- for most of the previous years of his life, the sense had become much more acute after Cedric’s death. It felt like waves pounding on a beach, the rising tide of a storm; ceaseless, repetitive, always growing in power and certainty, but not fast enough to crescendo, die off, and leave him in peace. Once the background anxiety of his worst dreams, it had taken root during the first Triwizard task, been aggressively pruned back before surging new, stabbing roots through his brain at the Yule Ball, been beaten back yet again in his free time and finally… finally…

Even Dumbledore had known that it would consume him, at some point.

Another pint materialized in the air, floating slightly above the tip of his nose, refusing to set down. Ron slowly looked from the glass, to the hand holding it, up the unmovingly-tattooed arm, to the crisp white shirt it unfolded from, and finally up to the pale face of the woman who held the glass, instead of levitating it at the tip of a wand. The bartender was looking down at him with a steady, appraising eye; Ron grunted, and forced himself into a far-more-appropriate sitting position. She put the glass down, but didn’t let go of it.

“The tube stops in half an hour, and you’re not driving yourself anywhere.”

It was a statement, not a question, which was a relief. Ron wasn’t sure he could come up with an honest-sounding lie quickly enough to satisfy her. He shook his head vigorously.

“Not a local though, so don’t sell me some shite about walking.“

He almost chuckled at her concern, but she had a valid point. He also was in no state to apparate back to the Burrow, either, but that’s what portkeys were for.

“I’ve got a ride waiting.”

She eyed him funnily, but he knew he spoke it honestly enough that she wouldn’t press the point. This was a local place, a hole in the wall in the heart of the bad part of Camden that no one would raid, or press him for ID, or give him a hard time, which was exactly why he was here. To run as far as he physically could away from everything and everyone he couldn’t look in the eye, while still being able to find his way back to a warm bed for the night. The chance of him having a cab burning somewhere, waiting on him, was low, but she’d done her due diligence. He wasn’t raising a fuss, just drinking with the steady focus of a man who knew how to handle himself even while blackout, in the back corner of an almost-empty bar on a Tuesday night. And he tipped well.

“Better not be the kid who sent you this pint; they’re even more sloshed than you are.”

Ron paused, confused. The bartender gestured to the side, towards the booths on the other side of the bar, in the darkness near the door that led back to the kitchen. At this angle it was hard to make out anything about them, other than their chin-length, white-blond hair where it hung forward from the hood of their hoodie, and that they was wearing what appeared to be a dark shoulder wrap that obscured much of the rest of their body. The angle of the booth and the dimness of the bar did the rest; had the bartender not pointed them out, Ron would have never seen them.

Ron shook his head again, and the bartender left, returning to the middle of the bar and to the cleanup work usually done at the end of a shift; wiping down and racking glasses, stocking lemon wedges, polishing the counter.

Ron raised his glass to the shadowy form in a silent cheers, and they raised theirs in a corresponding toast. They held a much smaller glass of some kind of dark amber liquid- Ron guessed whiskey- and the only shred of humor he had felt all night blossomed in his admiration of such a slip of what appeared to be a girl drinking straight whiskey, neat, by herself.

Ron took a big swig of his beer, half-sighing at the ease with which it slid down his throat. He was using the more socially appropriate version of the chugging technique he had learned in the Gryffindor common room; lowering his palate, letting the alcohol drop straight down his throat without discriminating between mouthfuls. The taste was barely tolerable, especially in contrast to butter beer, but it was cheaper, and it did the job he needed to, quickly, without immediately knocking him flat on his ass. Straight muggle liquor was borderline unpalatable, wizarding liquor had nearly killed him the half-dozen times that he had been driven to it, in the weeks immediately after the battle, and didn’t take him where he needed to go. He needed to find that hazy stillness on the other side of tipsy, where he felt how he imagined “okay” might have been, for someone else- memories loosely faded, thoughts not immediately to-hand, to exist in the moment without being wracked with guilt.

He swore he could feel it absorbing in through his cheeks, mainlining itself straight to his brain where it started to work on dulling whatever exposed edges of thought that remained unsheathed. One of the big benefits, he thought, of being of age- he might hate himself and be unable to stand pretty much everyone else he interacted with on a daily basis, but the misery of being fourteen, inadequate, and _sober_ was well and truly behind him.

He lowered his head back to the friendly wood, letting thoughts re-percolate with the soft bubbling of the alcohol, dissolve and float up through his already flamingly-red ears and flushed cheeks. Tears pricked at the corners of his eyes, stung the roof of his mouth, at the helplessness, at the rage that he had been chewing on for so long that it couldn’t find a distinct thought to start crystalizing around. The directionless, sourceless and outlet-less fury had been a part of him for so long, never really coped with or processed in a constructive fashion, and now it was too intense to start coping with or dealing with. He couldn’t help but flinch.

It took two more beers and another hour and a half before the soft-peace began to start fall down over him. Room buzzing, air winkling with a soft humid sheen, he put his eyes into his palms and breathed slowly, trying to let the tension drop from his shoulders. Which meant that he didn’t see the dark shadow in the corner watching him intently, leaning forward slightly from the booth to frame him better in the square of light that could be seen from that dim corner.

When he settled his tab and stumbled out of the bar, around the corner into the alley, and then just far enough that he was out of the deep orange halo of light cast by the mercury-light-streetlamp, he didn’t notice the more human-shaped shadow half melted into the paler darkness at the edge of the building. He didn’t see it when he flipped open his wallet, a single purple and orange wax paper wrapped sweet spinning into the air from the motion. He didn’t see it as he grabbed the sweet as fast as a striking snake and vanished without a puff of smoke, or a whisper of air. Which is why he wasn’t there to notice when they, equally as quietly, touched a stone on a ring on their right hand and vanished in the same fashion. 


End file.
